Posts Tagged ‘Fordow’

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is limiting his country’s nuclear program to fit Israel’s demands, at least for the time being, the Wall Street Journal reported.

According to senior U.S., European and Israeli officials, Khamenei’s decision was designed to avoid a crisis during Iran’s election year.

Khamenei wants the June vote to produce a new leader closer to his positions than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and to avoid the kind of unrest that marked Iran’s 2009 elections.

According to the Journal, Khamenei is “placing the Obama administration and its allies in a delicate strategic position, possibly constraining their response to Iran’s nuclear program.”

Iran’s nuclear program was supposed to hit its point of no return in 2013, enriching a sufficient amount of uranium to enable it to produce a nuclear weapon. In such a case, Israel and its allies were mulling the possibility and the timing of using military force.

A senior U.S. official working on Iran reported that “based on the latest IAEA report, Iran appears to be limiting its stockpile of 20% enriched uranium by converting a significant portion of it to oxide. But that could change at any moment.”

The officials still expect Khamenei’s moves to be a delay, rather than a change of policy. Iran’s actions still appear to be in line with accelerating the pace towards creating weapons-grade fuel. They point out the IAEA’s report that Iran has installed thousands of new centrifuges at the Fordow underground military facility in Qom,. The site is a huge, fortified bunker, possibly immune to U.S. or Israeli air strikes.

With the new centrifuges, Iran is capable of tripling the pace of enriching uranium. If Khamenei decides to step over Israel’s red line sometime this year, Iran could move rapidly to produce the weapons-grade fuel for a bomb.

“There is a good point to be made that Iran has accepted 250 kilograms as the red line, but they are doing this very cleverly,” said Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Iran’s moves would “enable Iran to cross the red line clandestinely in a matter of weeks,” he said.

United Nations nuclear watchdogs said Thursday that Iran has installed next-generation centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear plant, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu quickly responded that it has come closer to his “red line.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it saw the centrifuges earlier this month, adding that “this is the first time that centrifuges more advanced than the IR-1 have been installed” at Natanz.

The report added that no new equipment has been installed at the underground Fordow plant, which can enrich uranium at a much higher grade than at Natanz.

“This is a very grave report which proves that Iran is continuing to make rapid progress toward the red line” that the Prime Minister drew in his speech at the United Nations in September, according to statement from his office.

The report makes the issue of the Iranian nuclear threat even more pressing for discussions with President Barack Obama when he visits next month, the Prime Minister’s office added.

The White House warned that the window for diplomacy “will not stay open indefinitely.”

Following as string of unconfirmed reports, speculation and guesses, the U.S. has announces that it does not believe there was an explosion at the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran.

Last Friday, right wing news website World News Daily reported an explosion at Fordow that led to the collapse of the bulk of the facility built under a mountain near the city of Qom, burying some 240 employees.

The report was said to have come from defecting Iranian Intelligence operators and Revolutionary Guards. One of those alleged defectors, Hmidrza Zaakiri, on Tuesday told Israel Army Radio about the event and its outcome.

“It was a big explosion, and because the facility is built under the mountain rock, it is very hard to reach workers trapped in there,” said Zaakiri. “All the elevators and emergency stairs have collapsed.”

Tehran has already denied the reports that its main uranium enrichment plant was damaged, and now the United States also rejects this report.

“We have no information to confirm the allegations in the report and we do not believe the report is credible,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. “We don’t believe those are credible reports.”

Meanwhile the world is waiting for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which keeps track of the Fordow facility, to state whether there is evidence of sabotage there.

Iran has not updated its original response to the rumors, published on Sunday, which blamed the “Western propaganda machine” for the news.

“There has been no explosion in Fordow nuclear Facility,” the deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization Seyyed Shamseddin Barbroudi said on Sunday.

The credibility of the initial report’s author has been called into question: Reza Kahlili worked for CIA in Iran in the 1980s, then was moved to the U.S. with his family.

Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer reported that “Kahlili himself is a frequent speaker at events in US organized by right-wing organizations and those that support the right in Israel … He also compared the regime in Tehran to that of the Nazis, and called upon Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations.”

Currently Kahlili writes books and lectures on Iran. He claims “to still have an impressive network of sources in various government agencies.”

Kahlili has never shown his face in public, for fear of retribution. He always appears wearing a baseball cap, dark glasses and a surgical mask.

Pfeffer verified, however, that Kahlili’s “employment by the CIA has been confirmed by agency sources and an approving review of his book [A Time to Betray] even appeared on the CIA website.”

Now, with defector Hmidrza Zaakiri adding his voice to the story, it appears that there has been some smoke at Fordow, and we only need to find out how much fire created it.